In the first part of this series I went over how to create a basic skeleton of controllers and models so that we could create a mock test and get it green lighted along with some other tests for getting the basic navigation methods tested and green lighted.  In this part of the series I’m going to go over the model from a LINQ point of view.  After that in subsequent parts of this series I’ll start building out the views, utilizing of course a test driven development process.  So no…(read more)

Cada vez tenemos mas alternativas para realizar nuestros informes y soluciones Business Intelligence con herramientas de Software Libre.
Hace poco hacíamos un documento en exclusiva que comparaba las principales soluciones de reporting OS: Pentaho, Jasper y BIRT.

Hoy, os añadimos Open Reports que tiene algunas novedades interesantes. Aunque no es tan potente ni completo como los anteriores, maneja en su version PRO elementos interesantes (como la inclusión de consultas OLAP via Mondrian y Jpivot) y en la Open Source un paquete muy rápido y sencillo de usar.
Se trata de un entorno web que soporta los sistemas de reporting mencionados anteriormente.

Caracteristicas:
- Support for a wide variety of export formats including PDF, HTML, CSV, XLS, RTF, and Image.
- Web based Administration of Users, Groups, Reports, Parameters, and DataSources.
- Flexible Scheduling including Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Cron scheduling and multiple recipients.
- Comprehensive Report Parameter support including Date, Text, List, Query, and Boolean parameters.
- Fine-grained security controls access to Reports, Scheduling, and Administration functionality.
- Report Auditing tracks start time, duration, status, and user of every report generated.
- Support for multiple JNDI or Connection Pool DataSources for use in generating reports.
- Support for Drill Down reports and external application integration via secure report generation URL.

Podreis seguir las novedades mas actualizadas en su blog.
No olvdeis echar un ojo al AJAX Report Viewer, una demo muy interesante con las posibilidades de Open Reports.

In 1996 Building ETL Processes is ChildsplayI started building ETL processes in the SAS System for a customer. This Customer needed a metadata driven approach for their Data Warehouse solution.

We build a nice collection of datasets / tables which contained the metadata about the source, the target and the transformations. This was my very first encounter with metadata drive ETL processes. There was no tool at that time like Informatica PowerCenter, Microsoft SSAS and SAS Data Integrator. All was built in pure macro code which accessed the metadata and created code on the fly.

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Now 12 years later, (more…)

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Today I read the BLOG from Edwin Zwart, a colleague of mine at Capgemini The Netherlands. He started a BLOG last december and uses a lot of YOUTUBE visualization in his posts. I must admit, this is a real piece of out-of-the-box thinking and working (his post).

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I haven’t read his whole BLOG, but I certainly like to share one of his posts with you, my readers. (more…)

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On the first day, God created the dog and said:

"Sit all day by the door of your house and bark at anyone
Who comes in or walks past. For this, I will give you a life
span of twenty years."

The dog said: "That’s a long time to be barking. How about
only ten years and I’ll give you back the other ten?"

So God agreed.

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On the second day, God created the monkey and said:

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Today I got a message from Dan Linstedt, stating that I have passed the Data Vault Exam.

Original phrase from the mail;

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So as off today I am allowed to add certified DATA VAULT EXPERT to my LinkedIn Profile other signatures. Now let’s hope I will be able to make this wave happen in Europe together with my Data Vault Expert colleagues. We will start with a workshop within my company were we are trying to make a DV model from a sample database of one of the famous database systems (M$)

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Happy X-Mas from the Netherlands

He knew how to handle the situation.

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In 2007 we have seen a lot of consolidating going on in the Business Intelligence tools, but we did we see this one coming also ?!?!?

I got a message from a colleague of mine, stating that there was a rumour about Capgemini been taken over by a big Indian company called Wipro.

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Googling on WIPRO and Capgemini gave me the next results; (more…)

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Today I was at the BDWM course at my customer. The teacher explained to us how we should use the SOURCE SYSTEM COMPONENT within the IBM Banking Data Warehouse Model (BDWM). The resamblence with the Record Source field in a Data Vault Datamodel stroke me.

Both are used, in essence, to provide information about which source system was responsible for delivering the information / data, but only one of them has a 3NF which is right in my (humble) opinion. I am actually saying that the Data Vault is not complete, from how I see it… Let me explain my view on this matter;

IBM’s BDWM contains a SOURCE SYSTEM COMPONENT for each row in, for instance, the Involved Party Identifier entity. The structure for this entity looks much like the structure for a HUB in a Data Vault Model. It contains the natural identifier, the providing source system, the type of identifier, and a datetime stamp on which the row was first loaded. For history reasons, there are also effective and enddate time stamps in this entity.

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